Roger Ballen – Spirits and Spaces, Photobook Journal

Review by Gerhard Clausing •

October 2025

First Love, 2018

As always, one has to take a very deep dive into people’s psyche, including one’s own, to understand the art of Roger Ballen. His latest publication, Spirits and Spaces, continues his exploration of the human psyche and the ambiguous terrain in which dreams, nightmares, and realities intersect. Ballen has always been a master at presenting universes that are simultaneously intimate and unsettling, and this volume continues his lifelong commitment to probing the edges of visual and psychological experience, with color added as a further dimension for consideration.

Ballen has carved out a singular niche within the realm of contemporary photobooks. His images have a documentary slant, but also feature the immediacy of theatrical presentations. In this regard, the work of Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Duane Michals, or Christian Boltanski also come to mind, yet Ballen’s photographs remain unmistakably his own, and his storytelling requires more from the viewer. Let us look at some examples.

The 91 images contained in this photobook are presented in six parts: Childhood, Spectre,  Animus, Shadow, Libido, and Chaos. As is customary with Ballen’s work, all images are in square format, in this project with subdued colors that are on the warm side (but the warm colors should not make you think the subjects are easy-going). The sequencing of images leads the viewer on a journey into environments that feel both staged and discovered at the same time. We witness scenes with walls adorned with crude drawings, cluttered interiors, discarded objects. Human anatomy, representational doll parts are intermingled with many other objects; occasionally animals are also interspersed. The book brings us into these spaces as though they are living entities, haunted not by ghosts but by the raw imprints of human presence, often only intimated. Drawings, paintings, sculptured pieces frequently play an important role. The “spirits” that inhabit the pages are not merely metaphysical – they are embodiments of human instinct, memory, and trauma: Wasn’t that the stuff one of my recent nightmares was made of? Isn’t some of our current extended reality just as gruesome and just as puzzling as a certain scene that Ballen presents? His spaces are psychological chambers that confront the viewer with archetypes. They can speak to you in many different ways if you let them guide you.

Bothered, 2021

The design of the book reinforces Ballen’s trademark tensions between the documentary and the theatrical. The careful rhythm of dark and light immerses the reader in a helter-skelter world that feels timeless and suspended, where every object can be an important symbol. It is not just a collection of photographs, but a theater of the absurd, stripped of artifice, very much in your face. The very large pages and meticulous printing enhance that effect.

Ballen challenges us to confront what most photographic traditions tend to avoid: the disordered, the irrational, the uncanny. Yet within these unsettling spaces also lies a surprising tenderness. Many of the compositions, while initially grotesque, unfold into meditations on fragility, vulnerability, and the persistence of creativity in the midst of chaos. In that sense, Spirits and Spaces is about the resilience of the human spirit when faced with fractured environments and fractured selves. The essays by Colin and Ballen, printed in ghost-like light type, shed much further light on this project.

Inspecting, 2022

Spirits and Spaces reaffirms Roger Ballen as one of the most uncompromising and original voices in contemporary photography. This photobook does not comfort; it confronts. By inviting us to immerse ourselves in these ambiguous, spirit-filled environments, Ballen challenges us to expand our sense of what photographic images can evoke. The committed photobook viewer will find the experience full of startling surprises, yet deeply rewarding.

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The PhotoBook Journal previously featured reviews of these books by Roger Ballen: boyhood,  The Earth Will Come to Laugh and Feast (with Gabriele Tinti), Roger the Rat, Ballenesque, The Theatre of Apparitions, Asylum of the Birds, and Boarding House.

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Gerhard Clausing, PBJ Editorial Consultant and Editor Emeritus, is an author and artist from Southern California and Franconia.

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Roger Ballen – Spirits and Spaces

Photographer:   Roger Ballen (born in New York City; lives in Johannesburg, South Africa)

Texts: Colin Rhodes and Roger Ballen

Language: English

Publisher: Thames and Hudson, New York and London; © 2025

Design: Sarah Praill

Hardcover with tipped-in images, 144 pages; 11.25 x 12 inches (28.6  x 30.5 cm); printed and bound in China by C&C Offset Printing Co. Ltd; ISBN 978-0-500-02892-6

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